for some reason, this reminded me of Anna Frank (could it be the name) but of course, there were no pictures taken while she was up in the attic, and none before her death…but that’s what i was thinking of with this…and she was an artist, and she continued writing, so that she would exist forever.

I was introduced to her work again today through a documentary film. I think Gay used one of her photographs a while ago and I didn’t connect the dots from my modern art overview. I’m glad you gleaned something from her work; I always appreciate your comments.

This is really powerful. I think the interplay between the great photos and the poetry work amazingly well, emotionally and intellectually. The way you weave together the quotes and your own words, it’s quite musical and mesmerizing. I really really liked this.

There are personal and artistic connecting points between us. I began taking photographs at 6 with some of the same concerns and techniques (minus the figures). Of all the artists I’ve written about she’s the one I’ve felt most ‘inside’ of in a symbiotic way. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me, it’s wonderful to know some of that intensity was conveyed.

Whoa – what a tale. My ears automatically pick up with defenestration. I had heard of her vaguely – probably from some book review article so super superficially – but looked her up more. Very sad. Some people just very sensitive – obviously. Such an interesting poem. k.

Dude. You used “defenestration” in a poem. You’re awesome!
Next to the window throwing, the women unbuttoning their identities is my favorite part. Like our identity is something we wear. A heavy coat in winter, a light sweater in the spring, swimsuit in the summer. Something to be removed with relief before climbing into bed at night. Really vivid image.

Well, I can certain imagine as a parent being caught up forever in the legacy of a lost child. And, hard to know–you know some people just have chemical issues, a certain kind of sensitivity, which at that age can be especially dramatic and dangerous – hard to even speculate, really –

You do speculate, in a gentle way, in your poem but by quoting her, and also focusing on this issue of people becoming more enamored by dramatic story than the art. But of course there is a melodrama in it all, even in the work, and one can imagine that someone that committed to art and their work and issues of identity at a young age could be very dramatic and unlucky. By unlucky, I mean, that an incident averted might not necessarily have happened later. I do think there can be these terrible combinations of circumstance and chemistry, and parents may not help but may not be able to stop either. , I don’t know. k.

Yes, a mess from both sides and we’ll never know the why, the combination of factors that initiated her act. Her father asserts that it was upon finding she hadn’t been awarded an NEA grant (back when they gave them to individual artists). I have an intuition based on her journals and sex life but it’s only that and I don’t mean to blame anyone in the work including her. It’s such a complicated scenario and a complex legacy for them to handle. Her photos sell for 10s of thousands of dollars, one acquaintance joked that he sold one every time he needed to put one of his kids through college. The art world is a viscous and depraved place sometimes, exploiting and feeding into tragedy for money.

Yes I was going to enter into a conversation much like the one you’re having here with K. I think that was such a “brink” in the mid 70s. Everyone now thinks the transition came in the 60s with The Feminine Mystique and the world opened up for women; but it did NOT. The over-riding expectation was the return to the Victorian male-dominated, woman submissive culture of the 50s (see Mona Lisa Smile). That persisted right up to the political actions of women and GLBT in the late 70s and 80s into the 90s. The 60s were still consumed with the Black Civil Rights Movement. It took another decade + for those rights to expand to other disenfranchised groups — artists are always somewhat on the margins of society which, when hyper sensitive or with an altered chemistry pushes one still further. But help was so close then, and change was on its way! Wonderful exposition here, Anna.

quite fascinating what you did with her work and quotes…leaving so much to the imagination and wonder of it all. After looking at some more of her work, I can’t help but shake my head in awe? disbelief? or in response to my gut-level unease about her vision behind these photos, especially since she was so young. Young in age, but it seems she was versed well-beyond her years, which usually isn’t a good thing. Her photos make me feel very sad.

Great points Sheila, I agree with all of them. I try to avoid my triggers from her work, probably why I don’t have a book of it and didn’t use her nude self-portaits here. I think this display of disempowerment is also why she is a collector favorite (my piece on The Collector explored the theme of possession and its interconnection to sexuality). Of course there are other views but I have a hard time seeing them.

One art critic, Elizabeth Janus seems to sum up a sense that Francesca was actually empowered by her role as photographer and subject, ‘Again both playful and erotic, these photographs indicate at the same time a lightness of spirit, an acute formal sense and a witty symbolism that was all her own.’ I think this eroticism ties in to what I was saying about possession. I think self-possession is an enormous issue for young girls that are abused and what may drive them to art. Her art to me seems stuck in an unhealthy dialogue that doesn’t reclaim but further exploits. Again, these are just my opinions, colored by my own trauma and may have nothing to do with her work or reality. However, I chose her work precisely for this interaction and questioning, to challenge my views, explore my responses, and encourage the reader to do the same. Thanks Sheila, this has been a fascinating conversation.

you are welcome. I, too, am drawn to the psyche of childhood trauma victims (in an effort to understand my own, I suppose.) Regarding Janus’s views…I don’t know of any teenager who displays this type of self-empowerment and confidence. That develops much later in life. The emotional and cognitive development of a teenager does not allow for it. There’s no arguing biological developemnt, which is why I said in my original comment that she seems well-verse beyond her age which means she has experienced too much too young.

As far as the Janus quote, I see nothing playful about these photos. I see self-hatred, lost innocence, shame, and fear (why else would she exclude her face from so many of the photos or worse is that one of her and two other girls with photos of her held in front of their faces plus one also taped to the wall – talk about dissociation and severed identity – she has herself divided into 4 separate entities here!) This photo along with the one of her behind the wall paper really stood out to me for some reason…like she is saying that she is the wall, a wall in a dilapidated structure (symbolic of her family or maybe just of herself???) She hides in the walls, in containers, behind a fireplace frame, behind sheets, hiding, hiding, hiding. Hiding does not speak to “empowerment” in my opinion.

And lightness of spirit and witty symbolism are absurd conclusions but what do I know – I am no art critic. From what I can tell, Woodsman’s parents would not have let Janus organized Francesca’s exhibition if she didn’t have these light-hearted views on her work, however. Just sayin’.

I know with you that I am preaching to the choir 🙂 but it’s been enjoyable. Thanks!

Someone would prefer it! As if she had an heir that would press charges! You make me think of Marilyn Monroe too, inspected and dissected after the fact to expose a self that no one wanted to know until. God, if only she was the director of her own art. And here, every relic speaks and because of your art, some listen.

Robert Anton Wilson

Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say, ‘I love fish,’ and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).

Witold Gombrowicz

Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment – there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog. from Ferdydurke

I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.

Gustav Flaubert

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Dušan “Charles” Simić

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Monique Wittig

Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it… Language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise. But gender, an element of language, works upon this ontological fact to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being – subjectivity. Gender is an ontological impossibility because it tries to accomplish the division of Being. But Being is not divided. God or Man as being are One and whole. So what is this divided Being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible Being, it is a Being that does not exist, an ontological joke, a conceptual maneuver to wrest from women what belongs to them by right: conceiving of oneself as a total subject through the exercise of language. The result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech, and to force them to make their entrance in a crablike way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely. The result is to deny them any claim to the abstract, philosophical, political discourses that give shape to the social body. Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say ‘I’ I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor.

W.S. Merwin

All the things that really matter to us are impossible…Writing poetry is impossible. I don’t know how to write a poem. A poem – there has to be a part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don’t know. There is so much that comes out of what we don’t know and what we don’t have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility. – from Doing the Impossible

Thomas Aquinas

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.